Neville Mars is the principal of MARS Architects in Shanghai, a sustainable planning and architecture studio with over thirteen years of experience in Asia. MARS Architects have won national and international architecture competitions, including the winning entry for the national image museum in Chengdu, and the winning entry for a brand headquarters in Sofia, currently under construction. MARS has developed over a dozen integrated planning projects across Asia, including the Sino-Dutch Ecocity in Shenzhen, currently under construction, the Beijing 798 Art District, Vision United Mumbai, and the integral master plan for Caofeidian Ecocity. Recently MARS has been invited by UN HABITAT to collaborate on the planning of Tacloban in the Philippines, the city ravaged by typhoon Haiyan.

Neville Mars is also the director of the Dynamic City Foundation (DCF), a not-for-profit research platform investigating rapid urbanization in Asia. Starting his career at OMA, a distinct research-driven approach has become the trademark of the DCF, spawning collaborations with a range of educational, commercial, artistic and research institutes worldwide. Working across scales and disciplines DCF produces projects that bridge the traditional gap between theory and practice, art installations and technology, research and design.

Mars is a lecturer at the China Academy of Art and has a PhD from RMIT, focussed on urban theory. He is a member of the BMW Guggenheim Lab, and fellow presenter at the TEDglobal_INK conference. Mars is the author of the book The Chinese Dream - a society under construction (010 Publishers, N. Mars, A. Hornsby, Rotterdam 2008). The 800 page tome proved to be a prophetic analysis of the correlation between city building and society building in China, inspiring the theme of China's 12th FYP. Winter 2016, Mars will publish his second book “Manifesto of Mistakes - urban solutions for the new world”, this ecocity design manual rethinks the fundamental principles of the urban discipline, to arrive at a comprehensive strategy for process-driven integrated urban planning.

Neville Mars is the principal of MARS Architects Shanghai and director of the urban research platform Dynamic City Foundation. MARS is an award winning firm focussed on sustainable public buildings and ecocities across Asia, including the Sino-Dutch Ecocity in Shenzhen, Beijing 798, Caofeidian Ecocity, and United Mumbai for the BMW_Guggenheim. MARS has been invited by UN HABITAT to produce the masterplan for Tacloban, the city ravaged by super typhoon Haiyan. Mars is the author of the book The Chinese Dream - a society under construction (010 Publishers, 2008) and the upcoming book on planning ecocities 'Manifesto of Mistakes'.

For eight years The Dynamic City Foundation has been active in China operating within a unique multi-disciplinairy framework. Specializing in design research of green solutions for fast changing urban environments, the Dynamic City Foundation manifests its findings in a range of media form publications to buildings to large artistic interventions. It dismantles long-term observations, spatial concepts, urban theory, and ideas along all lines to create tangible works of art. DCF is uniquely future-focused, and scientific about its imaginings at a time when closed-circuit televisions patrol streets, where deterritorialized space extends beyond nationhood, and in which urban sprawl spills beyond borders, requiring cultural, physical, and virtual space to be woven together densely as a synthetic mesh. Regarding Chinese cities not only as enormous, chaotic organisms, but as laboratories for global forces, DCF provides refreshing insights in an era of dangerous flash urbanization, in which there is no time to imagine a long-term future.